This paper draws on the philosophy of Karl Popper to present a descriptive evolutionary epistemology that offers philosophical solutions to the following related problems: ‘What happens when learning takes place?’ and ‘What happens in human learning?’ It provides a detailed analysis of how learning takes place without any direct transfer of information from the environment to the learner, and it significantly extends the author's earlier published work on this topic. She proposes that learning should be construed as a special case (...) of ‘problem solving’ and as a fundamentally critical and creative process in which learning organisms develop ‘expectations’ that are not purely an outcome of genetic inheritance or random mutation. Human learning is then characterised with reference to: objectified knowledge; descriptive and argumentative language; theoretical problems; the search for error and specific limitation. If the author's evolutionary analysis of learning is valid, it would suggest that we should, if we wish to promote learning, be wary of corralling children and older students in environments that inhibit autonomous activity, that discourage criticality and creativity and generally limit opportunities for trial and error‐elimination. But education institutions, particularly those for older children and adolescents, are very often environments of this constraining kind. Traditionally, educationists have vastly underestimated the human potential for imaginative criticism—because in general they have not recognised the extent to which it lies at the heart of what humans, including the youngest children, do in order to succeed at even the most basic tasks. (shrink)

Error-based Simulation is a framework for assisting a learner to become aware of his error. It makes simulation based on his erroneous hypothesis to show what unreasonable phenomena would occur if the hypothesis were correct, which has been proved effective in causing cognitive conflict. In making EBS, it is necessary to make simulation by dealing with a set of inconsistent constraints because erroneous hypotheses often contradict the correct knowledge, and to estimate the 'unreasonableness' of phenomena in simulation because it must (...) be recognized to be 'unreasonable' by a learner. Since the method used in previous EBS-systems was much domain-dependent, this paper describes a method for making EBS based on any inconsistent simultaneous equations/inequalities by using TMS '). It also describes a set of general heuristics to estimate the 'unreasonableness' of physical phenomena. By using PCA and the heuristics, a prototype of EBS-system for elementary mechanics and electric circuit problems was implemented in which a learner is asked to set up equations of the systems. A preliminary test proved our method useful in which most of the subjects agreed that the EBSs and explanations made by the prototype were effective in making a learner be aware of his error. (shrink)